Ilive in Connectiut (boarding school), and Yale young Global Scholars is a very noteworthy/prestigious program-- very well known and known for being selective. but I wanted to ask a more diverse group- is it actually THAT good? Have you heard of it? Will my admission and participation in this program “WOW” the admissions officers, or will they kind of consider it like a typical precollege program?
Thanks!
bump
If you are looking at a summer program to “wow” a college adcomms, don’t bother: from their point of view it is a fancy summer camp. On the other hand, if you are looking at the program b/c it has an offering that is genuinely interesting to you, that fits with your overall story, go ahead and do it. Whatever you do with your summer, what will matter is what you can say you took away from the experience and how you acted on / applied that to yourself going forward.
I agree with the above. Do summer programs to pursue what you love; I attended multiple writing programs for three of my summers. It showed that I was dedicated to writing and had a genuine passion for it; I didn’t do it to pad my resume. I did it because I loved learning new ways to approach writing, and my genuine anecdotes from those experiences are what gave me character, not the camp itself or its perceived prestige.
how would admissions actually know if you’re interested in whatever summer program you did
to some extent they can never really know what you think / believe. But as @sumuzu points out, the programs she did lined up with her overarching interest in writing, that was probably also backed up with ECs at school (perhaps student newspaper or literary journal, for example). Note that @sumuzu emphasized the take-aways s/he got from the program, not the program itself that were what s/he highlighted. An anecdote of ‘during this experience, this happened’ followed by followed by ‘now I see this other angle’ followed by ‘since then I have done x’ is persuasive in a way that ‘I am passionate about writing’ is not (aka showing, not telling)